Spam and Viruses
How do we filter spam and virus emails for you in such a way that you will be in total control of what is spam and what is ham (non spam)?
Spam
We mainly use the Open Source mail filter SpamAssassin for our spam filtering nowadays. Spamassassin is an intelligent email filter which uses a diverse range of tests to identify unsolicited bulk email, more commonly known as Spam. These tests are applied to email headers and content to classify email using advanced statistical methods. In addition, it has a modular architecture that allows other technologies to be quickly wielded against spam and is designed for easy integration into virtually any email system.
How it works
This flexible and powerful set of Perl programs, unlike older spam filtering approaches, uses the combined score from multiple types of checks to determine if a given message is spam. Its primary features are:
- Header tests
- Body phrase tests. For more information, see SpamAssassinRules.
- Bayesian filtering (BayesFaq)
- Automatic address whitelist/blacklist (AutoWhitelist)
- Manual address whitelist/blacklist (ManualWhitelist)
- Collaborative spam identification databases (DCC, Pyzor, Razor2); See NetworkTests.
- DNS Blocklists, also known as "RBLs" or "Realtime Blackhole Lists". See DnsBlocklists
- Character sets and locales
Viruses
Virus filtering is done by Clam AntiVirus, this is a GPL (Open Source) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can use with your own software. Most importantly, the virus database is kept up to date .